Picket Fence Post

Item #1: New find — The Pajama Diaries

Amidst the glut of post-election analyses, number crunching and U.S. maps colored red and blue, this week I discovered a new comic strip in the Boston Globe. (If it was there before, I hadn’t noticed it until now. My bad.)

The Pajama Diaries, by Terri Libenson, features a character named Jill who is a freelance graphic designer who works out of her house, is married, and has two young girls. (That could be me, only with three kids, only one of whom is a girl.) Jill lives across the street from a family whose home she snarkily dubbed “Perfectville” and uses the DVD player as a babysitter so she can quickly get some work done without interruption from the little people.

After reading through some of her previous comic strips, they hit home, both about the challenges of working from home and about the struggle against the perfect, and they made me laugh. It’s gonna be a new staple in the Picket Fence Post home.

Item #2: Boston Globe Features ‘Mommy Dating’

Ever bring your kids to a local playground and hoped that a mom would talk to you or that a group of moms would welcome you into their fold? That’s called “mommy dating,” according to the Boston Globe  which likens playgrounds to meat markets:

“To the casual observer, the playground may appear a pleasant tableau of mothers and babysitters and, oh, children. But to the initiated, it can be as socially charged as a singles’ bar. The blonde mom over here, the organics-only mom over there, the insecure moms hovering near the swings, pretending to be occupied by the kids. Meanwhile, style is assessed, labels identified, judgments made.”

Now that my kids have gotten older and we don’t hang out at playgrounds like we used to, I’ve become the mom standing on the sidelines at one of my kids’ bazillion games, chugging a caffeinated beverage, and hoping someone won’t point a finger at me and say, “There’s the mom who hates on kids’ sports and the PTO online and in columns. Don’t talk to her.”

Item #3: First Family Gets Ready

On page one of today’s New York Times there’s a feature story entitled, ”A Family Expected to Balance State Dinners with Sleepovers.” The reporter spoke with Michelle Obama’s Chicago friends and how the First Family plans to create its own support system for the girls on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Interesting read.

Image credit: The Pajama Diaries.

“There will be young children in the White House for the first time since the Kennedy generation,” so said NBC’s Brian Williams at 11 p.m. on election night after projecting the state of California for Senator Barack Obama, thereby earning him enough electoral votes to capture the presidency.

My children are the same ages as Malia and Sasha Obama, 10 and 7. Michelle Obama has struggled with the same working mom issues as I have (although I don’t have a mega-watt, power job like hers). Michelle and Barack Obama were married two weeks before The Spouse and I were wed. With all those similarities, it will be fascinating for me to watch the Obamas navigate parenthood and their work while the whole world is watching.

For my kids, it’s also going to be interesting to see their experiences mirrored by children in the White House, especially for The Girl, who feels a kinship with Malia because they’re both Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers fans.

Image credits: The Huffington Post.

UPDATE: I just had a column about First Kids in the White House published on the Mommy Track’d web site.

* Cross-posted from Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum. *

Phew! Anyone else feel as though you’ve been through a marathon? Two years of watching every debate in both parties, of reading online and in newspapers and magazines about the campaign, of watching YouTube videos, of following every detail of the race can take a lot out of a person. And I wasn’t even a candidate, the spouse of a candidate, working for the campaign or covering it as an embedded reporter. Those folks must feel as though they’ve been run over by a truck right about now.

At 11 p.m. last night, after the networks officially called the entire presidential election for Illinois Senator Barack Obama, I ran upstairs and woke up my kids to tell them the news. They weren’t completely awake, though, and didn’t remember that I’d woken them up when I spoke with them this morning. However, after learning of the results, along with the fact that 10-year-old Malia Obama and 7-year-old Sasha Obama were promised a puppy by their dad, I saw that puppy-gleam in their eyes too. (Sorry kids, you’re not getting a puppy. Your parents didn’t just complete a presidential campaign.)

Kudos are due to Arizona Senator John McCain, who was eloquent and gracious in making his concession speech. I felt badly for him while watching him, a former POW, tearing up as he acknowledged the historic nature of Obama’s win. He’s an honorable man who was saddled with a bad campaign that made bad choices. Had he won and a woman ascended to the vice presidency for the first time in our nation’s history, I would like to think that people would’ve been moved to see a woman succeed.

And Obama’s acceptance speech, in my humble opinion, will be one children will later read about in history books:

Seven-year-old Piper Palin — who’s the same age as Sasha Obama — provided one of those moments last night at the Republican convention that makes parents like me, the mother of a 7-year-old boy, simultaneously laugh and cringe.

While Sasha Obama stole some of her mother Michelle’s thunder at the Democratic convention last week when she took the microphone and bellowed greetings to her dad via satellite TV, Piper Palin was sitting in the audience near her dad Todd last night and was holding her baby brother during her mom’s speech. Then Piper “groomed” her little bro in a moment only a parent of another little kid could love. ( Video clip here.)

Anyone catch the Obama girls during Monday night’s Democratic convention? Seven-year-old Sasha and 10-year-old Malia were adorable and a bit precocious. As they came onto the stage to hug their mother Michelle after she told a national audience that the Obama family is just like anyone else’s, the girls turned toward a creepy Orwellian TV screen with their father’s face on it. They offered Barack their high-pitched greetings and awkwardly interrupted his own political pitch.

I always love it when kids drag their politician parents off-message when the media’s watching. In those moments we get to see a glimpse of the pols’ authentic selves, the part that remains unpolished by political consultants. Meanwhile we mere mortal parents are interrupted and pulled off-message on a daily basis — on the phone, during attempts to discuss something at the dinner table – although not while we’re in front of a television audience.